Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds / Mercury Rev - London Brixton Academy - 10/11/04
5/5
By: Thomas Hannan
Mercury Rev are one of the few acts who could pull this support slot off. Pondering on who else could compliment the complexity of the Bad Seeds sound without aping it, be melodic to the point of grandeur and not tread on the toes of what's to come, you draw a blank. So, the perfect start then - and a delightful set, too.
It's both a teaser and a reminder, the kind of set that will jog your memory as to the amount of great tunes that the Rev have actually written ('Opus 40' is marvellous, and before tonight, we'd almost forgotten that fact), whilst simultaneously entice with new material. There must, we deduce, be a new album looming, and now we're very much looking forward to it. Jonathan Donahue up front is a pleasure to watch, the kind of person who can pull you more into the music just by staring at his deep, dark eyes, following his hands as they twirl above his head, emphasising little thoughts. 'Spiders & Flies' closes things, and we'd forgotten how good that one was too.
But there's something both beautiful and sinister looming. Now, the dark really is rising. You stand waiting for it, in a strange way, scared. Bizarrely though, because this is consistently some of the most delicately melodic, intelligently tuneful music, but live, the intensity is shocking. Nick Cave and all the many, many Bad Seeds are the darkest of treats. And this is an utter delight.
The first hour of the set is dedicated in entirety to the queer little musings, the sleazy, shady, beautiful, wry little oddities of Cave's current record, the double LP opus of 'The Lyre of Orpheus' and 'Abattoir Blues'. From anyone else this would come across as pretentious and unfair to a crowd who've paid £25 a ticket to hear the hits, if there are really any 'hits' as such, and to an extent, it does. But every time you start to berate a song for not being a well-known one, within minutes your criticism is redundant, as the material is so strong. 'Abattoir Blues' is punishing in its strength, the oddly sexy 'Babe, You Turn Me On' is queasily seductive, but it's the eccentricities of the likes of 'Lyre Of Orpheus' that really shine, told like a distasteful joke, humour of the blackest kind.
Cave is an entertaining figure to follow around the stage. He looks restless when sat at the piano, jittering and scowling, much more comfortable when strutting around the stage, pointing menacingly at the audience, utterly possessed by his music. He's rocking, hard. The rest of the Seeds remain calm, but deeply focused. They disappear after sixty minutes, only to return with a forty-five minute encore of classics, and the audience goes in to overdrive. 'Red Right Hand' even gets a bit of crowd participation going, 'Stagger Lee' is cryptically, heavily dazzling, but it's at the set's most quiet, the astounding 'God Is In The House' that we're pulled in the most. We've followed the melody through the song, been drawn in beyond return, and then Cave draws it back to just a whisper, the atmosphere thick with admiration and the most beautiful of tunes, and we're asked to shout. The place erupts with cries of 'God is in the house!', and it's beautiful. They vacate the stage.
People are already leaving, thinking, quite understandably, that it couldn't get much better. But Cave and the Seeds return for 'The Mercy Seat'. Few songs have ever sounded this vital, this intense, this oppressive. It's one of the best things anyone in the sold-out venue will ever have heard, and few things any of us listen to again will match its power. Simply stunning.
So, indeed, was God in the house, after all? We think we saw him down the front. For something this exquisite, he'd have been a fool to be anywhere else.
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